That's why people are working on lossless audio compression in the first place,
People are working on lossless codecs because: (I probably forgot some reasons)
There are people who think that 256kbps MP3 isn't good enough. Whether they're right or wrong, they'll still use a lossless codec.
If you're iteratively processing stuff (transcoding, editing, mixing, etc) it's way better to do the lossy step only once than each time. Just 'cause 1 iteration may be unaudible doesn't mean 5 will be. (indeed, transcoding is one of the best ways to bring out compression artifacts!)
It's interesting. I write lots of code that nobody else necessarily wants. For fun.
Seamless play. Mp3 by its very nature will cause a pop or blip or something if you rip, say two consecutive tracks from a continuous mix into two files, and then encode them. (nevermind the fact that most players don't even try to avoid extra gaps) It might be possible to get it right if you engineered your whole ripping process around it (rip an extra mp3 frame of overlap on each file and then throw out that frame once you've done the encoding?) but I don't think anyone's done that.
Even if it does trick people into shutting up, it's sort of disingenuous. Since there is no statistical correlation between milk drinkers and alchoholics, there is a statistical correlation between hard drug users and.. uh, easy drug users (pot).
In a sense pot probably is a gateway drug - if you want to use drugs to alter your mental/emotional state, you're likely to start with pot, due to its easy availability and the fact that it's really safe. As a result eliminating pot (for the sake of argument, pretend this is possible) would just mean that something else will end up as "my first drug". Which, great.:/
Well, there's usually some kind of causal relationship, but often it's "these two things are caused by a third thing that we didn't even think to study".
Magical Drop is "ok". But MPE has the same potential for chains (that is, you can extend an existing chain by throwing more stuff together, but the potential for regular chains is greater, because of the introduction of the extra coin (though to really be able to use this effecively you have to figure out the rules for where it will appear).
My biggest complaint about MD3 is that the controls feel sluggish to me. I think that's because you can't move until you're done grabbing or dropping a piece (in MPE you can drop (or actualy grab) something and then scoot over while it falls). Which means that you just can't be as fast.
I actually wrote a game similar to both of these, but with a color mixing theme - Magic Crayon Conundrum. In the process I studied MPE and MD3 pretty carefully. It needs a lot of work before it's on par with them, in terms of features or production quality or so (in the middle of a rewrite), but if you like this kind of thing, by all means, check it out.
I think that a lot of this is that Yahoo! has a fuckload of other shit other than searching. Yahoo! games, Yahoo! news, Yahoo! finance, Yahoo! being publicly traded.
If you do "google search" and "yahoo search" you get about 3.8m vs 4.7m respectively. Yahoo! still comes out ahead, but not by nearly as much. You also get 2.7m for Altavista, but who the fuck cares anymore.
The way this works is Gator Inc, or whoever, will pay you per copy of their software you trick your users into installing. I doubt it's still this high, but when I was working for Sonique (the mp3 player) in early 2001 Gator offered $1 (!) per install (we turned them down).
Panel de Pon is the first game to introduce the notion of attack blocks from chains, and is a fine game, but the Best 2p puzzle game is Money Puzzle Exchanger, for the Neo Geo. The PSX version is okay, if you have a region 2 (or modded) PSX, but the neo geo one is the one to play. I guess if you don't have a Neo Geo you can just use MAME.:/
You should also check out Starsweep, if you can find it. It's for the PSX and was made by the same guy who wrote Panel de Pon.
Btw: I've recently (a few weeks ago) to start building a definitive collection of puzzle games (with the appropriate hardware. Fuck emulators!). Any suggestions?
Okay, well, maybe you should check out the demos on this disk with music by Dune (X14, MegaBlast, Square, The Nonstop Ibiza Experience), who about a year ago put out music on Warp under the moniker Brothomstates. Though my favorite is md (Moral Hard Candy, TE-2RB), now releasing on Miami's Merck records (sorry, Lassi, if you're reading this:D)
Sprint used to have a pretty big campaign advertising "Digital Clarity", but that's bullshit. The tests I've done say that analog sounds better. This doesn't mean it IS better, however. Digital networks are way cheaper to set up and run. Which, believe it or not, they do pass the savings on to you. This is why Sprint can offer what ammounts to $0.10 a minute peak and infinite offpeak usage (and tmobile is even cheaper).
As for me, I'm content with the sound quality of my digital phone (unless my reception is bad, people I'm talking to can't tell I'm on a cell phone) - but I'm very happy with the price.
And as for microwaving your brain, the analog phones put out a lot more power than than the digital ones - but the figures for american phones are like 600mW and 200mW (analog and digital) compared to the 1000KW a typical microwave oven will output (sucking about 1.5KW of electricity to do it) - hardly a reasonable comparison.
Do you mean long exposures, or low contrast? For long exposures, this four minute exposure disagrees with you. In the article the guy says he couldn't even see that terrace it was so dark.
What do you think it is about low light situations that precludes digital cameras from working well?
As for speed.. yeah, my digital camera only goes up to ISO 1000. But you don't have to go to 1000 to take normal non-posed shots successfully (There's a lot of space between posed shots and extremely fast moving action shots.)
You forgot to add that you can't use UV or IR film in digital cameras.:D
How about this: You pay for your car (computer) and then you pay for some gas (electricity) and then a toll bridge (connection fee) and then parking (?? no anology ??) and then you have to pay for a movie ticket (content) and the they bombard you with advertisments (banners) and product placements and then the movie (slashdot) turns out to be total crap.
That said, by changing the weather the way we want in the short term, we change unpredictable weather from one unknown outcome to another. There's no reason to think that the altered future weather patterns are any way more likely to be worse, just different.
Being a monopoly is not illegal, however it does place additional restrictions on your buisness practices, which is what the DOJ (and pretty much everyone else) says Microsoft is violating.
I don't mind if Google offers a lot of different services. What I do mind is if these services interfere with one another. For instance, on Yahoo! there are 274 links on the front page. Google has 13. So long as their search works well and their site deisgn is sane (that is, they don't try to shove their other services down my throat, like a Pusher Robot with Bread), the more services the better!
I don't believe that Google WILL try to be all things to all people, but I don't mind if they do, so long as they succeed in delivering to me the services that I want.
I don't know how much you make, but there are plenty of cards with programmable pixel shaders for a little over $100. If that's the majority of your monthly paycheck, you need to work more hours, or in a country where there's a reasonable minimum wage.
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I don't think that "lossless" sounds three times as good as 128kbps mp3.
People are working on lossless codecs because: (I probably forgot some reasons)
Even if it does trick people into shutting up, it's sort of disingenuous. Since there is no statistical correlation between milk drinkers and alchoholics, there is a statistical correlation between hard drug users and .. uh, easy drug users (pot).
:/
In a sense pot probably is a gateway drug - if you want to use drugs to alter your mental/emotional state, you're likely to start with pot, due to its easy availability and the fact that it's really safe. As a result eliminating pot (for the sake of argument, pretend this is possible) would just mean that something else will end up as "my first drug". Which, great.
Well, there's usually some kind of causal relationship, but often it's "these two things are caused by a third thing that we didn't even think to study".
I could very well ask you the same question!!!
"Where there's correlation there's causation" - the motto of shitty research everywhere.
Are you hinting at the America's Army game? That was developed by the US Army and is free? Or are you unaware of it?
Magical Drop is "ok". But MPE has the same potential for chains (that is, you can extend an existing chain by throwing more stuff together, but the potential for regular chains is greater, because of the introduction of the extra coin (though to really be able to use this effecively you have to figure out the rules for where it will appear).
My biggest complaint about MD3 is that the controls feel sluggish to me. I think that's because you can't move until you're done grabbing or dropping a piece (in MPE you can drop (or actualy grab) something and then scoot over while it falls). Which means that you just can't be as fast.
I actually wrote a game similar to both of these, but with a color mixing theme - Magic Crayon Conundrum. In the process I studied MPE and MD3 pretty carefully. It needs a lot of work before it's on par with them, in terms of features or production quality or so (in the middle of a rewrite), but if you like this kind of thing, by all means, check it out.
I think that a lot of this is that Yahoo! has a fuckload of other shit other than searching. Yahoo! games, Yahoo! news, Yahoo! finance, Yahoo! being publicly traded. If you do "google search" and "yahoo search" you get about 3.8m vs 4.7m respectively. Yahoo! still comes out ahead, but not by nearly as much. You also get 2.7m for Altavista, but who the fuck cares anymore.
Step 3 = step 5.
The way this works is Gator Inc, or whoever, will pay you per copy of their software you trick your users into installing. I doubt it's still this high, but when I was working for Sonique (the mp3 player) in early 2001 Gator offered $1 (!) per install (we turned them down).
Panel de Pon is the first game to introduce the notion of attack blocks from chains, and is a fine game, but the Best 2p puzzle game is Money Puzzle Exchanger, for the Neo Geo. The PSX version is okay, if you have a region 2 (or modded) PSX, but the neo geo one is the one to play. I guess if you don't have a Neo Geo you can just use MAME. :/
You should also check out Starsweep, if you can find it. It's for the PSX and was made by the same guy who wrote Panel de Pon.
Btw: I've recently (a few weeks ago) to start building a definitive collection of puzzle games (with the appropriate hardware. Fuck emulators!). Any suggestions?
Oh that would be so great..
Oops, I was just running through the liner notes and not paying enough attention. Thanks.
Beh, Timeless is way better. ;)
Okay, well, maybe you should check out the demos on this disk with music by Dune (X14, MegaBlast, Square, The Nonstop Ibiza Experience), who about a year ago put out music on Warp under the moniker Brothomstates. Though my favorite is md (Moral Hard Candy, TE-2RB), now releasing on Miami's Merck records (sorry, Lassi, if you're reading this :D)
Okay okay okay, that should read either 1KW or 1000 W, but not both. Obviously.
Sprint used to have a pretty big campaign advertising "Digital Clarity", but that's bullshit. The tests I've done say that analog sounds better. This doesn't mean it IS better, however. Digital networks are way cheaper to set up and run. Which, believe it or not, they do pass the savings on to you. This is why Sprint can offer what ammounts to $0.10 a minute peak and infinite offpeak usage (and tmobile is even cheaper).
As for me, I'm content with the sound quality of my digital phone (unless my reception is bad, people I'm talking to can't tell I'm on a cell phone) - but I'm very happy with the price.
And as for microwaving your brain, the analog phones put out a lot more power than than the digital ones - but the figures for american phones are like 600mW and 200mW (analog and digital) compared to the 1000KW a typical microwave oven will output (sucking about 1.5KW of electricity to do it) - hardly a reasonable comparison.
Do you mean long exposures, or low contrast? For long exposures, this four minute exposure disagrees with you. In the article the guy says he couldn't even see that terrace it was so dark.
:D
What do you think it is about low light situations that precludes digital cameras from working well?
As for speed.. yeah, my digital camera only goes up to ISO 1000. But you don't have to go to 1000 to take normal non-posed shots successfully (There's a lot of space between posed shots and extremely fast moving action shots.)
You forgot to add that you can't use UV or IR film in digital cameras.
How about this: You pay for your car (computer) and then you pay for some gas (electricity) and then a toll bridge (connection fee) and then parking (?? no anology ??) and then you have to pay for a movie ticket (content) and the they bombard you with advertisments (banners) and product placements and then the movie (slashdot) turns out to be total crap.
That said, by changing the weather the way we want in the short term, we change unpredictable weather from one unknown outcome to another. There's no reason to think that the altered future weather patterns are any way more likely to be worse, just different.
Being a monopoly is not illegal, however it does place additional restrictions on your buisness practices, which is what the DOJ (and pretty much everyone else) says Microsoft is violating.
Altavista made it big by having more if the web indexed, back when everyone else did just as bad a job of sorting results.
Yahoo! made it big when raw search wasn't good enough and a human generated and maintained categorized list of web sites was actually useful.
Google made it big when it did a good job of sorting results, and kept the design simple.
I don't mind if Google offers a lot of different services. What I do mind is if these services interfere with one another. For instance, on Yahoo! there are 274 links on the front page. Google has 13. So long as their search works well and their site deisgn is sane (that is, they don't try to shove their other services down my throat, like a Pusher Robot with Bread), the more services the better!
I don't believe that Google WILL try to be all things to all people, but I don't mind if they do, so long as they succeed in delivering to me the services that I want.
I don't know how much you make, but there are plenty of cards with programmable pixel shaders for a little over $100. If that's the majority of your monthly paycheck, you need to work more hours, or in a country where there's a reasonable minimum wage.